Updated 2012-06-27-ghetto-dynamic-dns.md

_drafts/2012-06-27-ghetto-dynamic-dns.md

@@ -8,4 +8,18 @@ With great power comes great responsibilty , As a developer one best things is b
 
 So while DNS is something that everyone needs it is also something that not everyone wants to pay for. Personally I never need to update my various DNS entries more than once every couple of months so paying more than $5 a month is a bit more than I care to spend. At the same time  everytime I build a web app I want to give it a nice DNS name so that things look a bit nicer. In the past all this was covered thanks to everydns which was donation based DNS provider.
 
-During my entire time with everydns I never really had any issues with them but sometime last year they got bought out by dyndns. Since I was an existing customer when I was migrated to DynDNS I got a reduced price for couple of months. This reduced price was still more than i was willing to pay but I had close to 10 domains with them and I was just not in the mood at the time to migrate to another service. Then roughly 3-4 months ago DynDNS ended my reduced pricing and started charging me the full rate for their service that I had been migrated to which 
+During my entire time with everydns I never really had any issues with them but sometime last year they got bought out by dyndns. Since I was an existing customer when I was migrated to DynDNS I got a reduced price for couple of months. This reduced price was still more than i was willing to pay but I had close to 10 domains with them and I was just not in the mood at the time to migrate to another service. Then roughly 3-4 months ago DynDNS ended my reduced pricing and started charging me the full rate for their service that I had been migrated to which costs $30. 
+
+This was now the straw that broke the camels back. I quickly setup a dns server to manage my various domains. After much help from @tgenov the server worked just as I wanted. The only thing holding me back from cancelling my DynDNS account was the fact that I needed Dynamic DNS for one of my domains. At the time I could not work out a free or really cheap way to hookup dynamic DNS with a custom domain. The cost for dynamic DNS from DynDNS is $30 a year for a single domain. This is also pretty close to what other providers like NoIP charge as well. In the end this is still more than I was willing to spend and it would mean that I would need to split my hosting over multiple providers. 
+
+Finally I really did not want to hack up my own dynamic DNS with bash and sed scripts. I finally got distracted by other work and promptly forgot about my little project until couple of days ago when reconciling my expenses I realized how much I was spending for DNS. Having finally launched signalnoi.se I decided to take a look again and see what my options were. Turns out there is a pretty simple solution in the form of Amazons Route 53. The best part with Route 53 is that they have an API to control everything. So now with 2 scripts I can grab my external IP address and then fire off a call to the Route 53 API to make change to my domains record. I should mention that the cost for hosting a domain with Amazon is $0.50 per domain. This means that for the cost of hosting with DynDNS I could host 60 domain with Amazon. 
+
+## How To
+
+1. Register your domain in the Amazon Route 53 UI.
+2. Update your domains records to point to the DNS servers given to you in step 1.
+3. Wait for your changes to propergate 
+4. Install the following python packages (pystun and cirrus).
+5. Export your ACCESS and SECRET keys from the console 
+6. Finally execute update_host.py "domain name here" -a "IP here" with the name and IP address of your domain. This will update the A record for your domain to point to the new IP address you provided.
+